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Reformers, Socialists and Communists

An Anarchist Critique

Have you ever wondered why reforms tend to perpetuate the same old status quo? Why your union seems to be yet another boss and only offers you band-aid solutions when faced with a rotten system? Why socialist parties oppose socialism? Or why the 'Communists' of eastern Europe and China never brought the freedom they promised millions? Alexander Berkman discusses these questions and others in Reformers, Socialists, and Communists: an Anarchist Critique.

Berkman points out the ﬂaws of so-called reformists, the danger of relying on 'progressive' politicians, the weakening of the labor movement, the corruption of socialist groups by a biased political system, and the moral decay and slide toward totalitarianism of the Bolshevik movement in Russia — and all this in 1929! Backing up his statements with sound reasoning, Berkman offers the reader a rational, sober, but uncompromising view of the politics and economics of our daily struggles, both at the ballot box and the lunch box.

Alexander Berkman (1870-1936) was a ﬁrm and valiant anarchist. He is best known as the lover of Emma Goldman, the would-be assassin of brutal strikebreaker Henry Clay Frick, and a leading writer of the American anarchist movement. Some of his more famous works include Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, and What is Communist Anarchism? (from which this pamphlet is drawn, chapters 10-18), among others. Berkman was exiled from the United States for activities in opposition to the First World War in 1919. He died in Nice, France, in 1936.

Of him, noted American author H.L. Mencken said: '…we hunt him as if he were a mad dog… With him goes a shrewder head and a braver spirit than has been seen in public among us since the Civil War.'

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